Friday, April 15, 2011

Franz: No Crucifixion Nails with Caiaphas

One advantage that a scam artist has over his victims is preparation time. He can skillfully prepare his scam over months and years, but when he springs it on the mainstream media, they take his pre-packaged story and go to press with it immediately, lest all of the audience read the story at other outlets. If you take two or three days to investigate, the news is now old. Fortunately for both the purveyor and conveyors of the story, the audience is not so concerned with details and by the time the scam is revealed, the audience is entertained by the newest sensation.

The problems with Jacobovici’s “Nails of the Cross” are in the details. Gordon Franz has done some rather elementary detective work that suggests that Jacobovici is purposefully misleading his audience in order to sell his show.

Jacobovici’s theory is that these two nails from Jesus’ crucifixion were buried with Caiaphas because he converted to faith in Jesus. The problem, as Franz notes, is that these two nails were not buried with Caiaphas. The burial cave in question held dozens of people and six ossuaries (bone boxes). Two of the ossuaries have inscriptions related to Caiaphas (#3 and #6), but no nails were found in either of these ossuaries. One nail was found inside Ossuary 1, and the other was found in a burial niche. Jacobivici’s presentation assumes that Caiaphas’s remains were interred in Ossuary 3, but this ossuary contained only the bones of women and children. Ossuary 6 had the bones of a 60-year-old man, possibly the famous high priest, but this beautiful and intact stone box did not contain any nails.

Second, Franz observes that there are very obvious reasons for nails being found in a burial tomb. Sometimes lids were attached to ossuaries by means of a nail. In this tomb, names were scratched into the sides of several ossuaries, and this was done using nails. As Franz writes:

It is highly probable that the nail found in Kokhim IV was used for scratching the names of Caiaphas on Ossuary 6, but it is important to note that it was not found inside the ossuary of Caiaphas and thus not a talisman with divine power to protect Caiaphas in the afterlife as Jacobovici would like to claim.

Third, Franz questions whether a nail only three inches long could have sufficiently held an adult man to a cross. The only nail known to have been used in a crucifixion was longer than four inches.

Jacobovici has said he spent three years making this video, yet if he had spent three hours in a library looking at a handful of articles he would have known that the evidence does not support his theory. But since his reporting depends on these very same articles, it is impossible for him to claim that he is ignorant of this data. The success of his show is dependent upon the ignorance of his viewers, something that his highly selective presentation is intended to maintain.